Your actions and words matter more than you realize; your story can make a difference. It might resonate with someone in need like no one else’s.
Some of the topics we’re very interested in hearing from you are:
- What are some things you wish your parents would know about you?
- Do you want to see a therapist? Why or why not?
- Are your parents happy or stressed? How do they affect you?
- What are you most stressed out about?
- What would you like to see “fixed” in our education or behavioral health systems?
- What do you wish you knew when you were growing up?
-
Youth Cyberbullying: What 160 Young People told us
From WhatsApp to TikTok, young people share how cyberbullying impacts them and the fixes they believe in. Cyberbullying is one of the most pressing challenges facing young people today. To better understand its impact and explore what kinds of support actually help, we conducted a Youth Cyberbullying Support and Intervention Survey with 120 respondents. The…
-
Research in College: 6 Inspiring Lessons I Learned
What does “college research” actually mean? Before this summer, I thought it was just a buzzword — something tour guides bragged about and brochures plastered across glossy photos. Then I spent ten weeks at Argonne National Lab doing high-performance computing research, and it clicked. I worked on integrating AMD’s GPU library (RCCL) into MPICH, one…
-
5 Things I’ve Learned in the Impact Fellowship
For those of you who don’t know, I’m in curaJOY’s impact fellowship. We are creating an annotated data set, algorithm, and intervention system for cyberbullying. It will be the first one of its kind made 100% by gen z. Our hope is that with our lived experience of the modern world, we will be able…
-
Anti-Anxiety Methods That Don’t Work
Breathing exercises my opp. Hello friends, welcome back to the Anxiety talk show. Just a few days ago, in my AP Psychology class, my teacher introduced us to positive affirmations. They’re part of the self-affirmation theory that claims that how individuals choose to react to information changes how they conceptualize themselves. Thus, saying positive things…
-
Neurodivergents and Cyberbullying
So a while ago in August, I went to SCDD’s San Diego Regional Youth Leadership Forum. It was pretty nice going there, there was lots of food, and the inspiring speakers like Toni Saia and Otto Lana talking about their experiences with the real world and what it means to them to have a disability, really left me…
-
Machine Learning 101: A Youth Guide to Teaching Computers to Think
When Netflix recommends your next favorite show or when your email filters out spam, that’s machine learning at work. Machine learning (ML) is a branch of artificial intelligence that allows computers to learn from data and make decisions without being explicitly programmed. Instead of humans writing every rule, the computer figures out patterns itself and…
-
Safe to Break, Ready to Ship
I hired a newbie handyman to replace five faucet fixtures. He and I both assumed he knew what he was doing. Nothing leaked before. That night, every sink he touched started dripping. Three callbacks and extra parts later, the total bill far exceeded what a licensed plumber’s—plus the time and trust you can’t get back.…
-
A Real Human Being, or a Grade Machine?
Caitlyn Wang’s wonderful article, besides managing to alleviate my anxiety about not taking enough AP courses, also brought up another thought in mind. In her article, there was this quote “Nothing is more fragile than a child who only knows how to chase accolades. Let’s help them learn who they are when the trophies are…
-
Literature Review: Cyberbullying Labeling Schemes and Annotation Guidelines
Cyberbullying, defined as willful and repeated harm inflicted through digital means, continues to rise in prevalence and severity, particularly among youth populations, who are exposed to social media at starting at young ages. The mental health consequences of cyberbullying—including anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation—are well-documented (NIH, 2023). As a result, researchers have increasingly turned to…
